3/1/11

Enobong Etteh ’13, victim of last week’s WestCo invasion, is now suffering the consequences of his own generosity.

The sophomore, who provided clothing and hospitality to a bewildered Middletown resident who wandered into his room, is now being bombarded with similar requests from hundreds of Wesleyan students.

Upon arriving at Etteh’s room for an interview, I was surprised to find a line of students stretching the length of the Up 4 hallway, then down the stairs and into the WestCo lounge, where the meandering line made a nice swirl pattern, then back up the stairs into Up 3. The students loitered casually, eagerly anticipating free furniture and clothing.

“You never know what you’re going to get,” said Eli Meixler ’13, now a regular customer. “Yesterday he gave me a tye-dye onesie.”

“I heard he has a blender,” speculated Ethan Hoffman ’12, who hopes that he will be able to make smoothies while doing yoga in the Community Service House living room.

After fighting my way through the 50-person bottleneck at Etteh’s door, I found him frantically handing his possessions to eager gift-seekers, barely able to satisfy the wild demand. “I don’t have much left,” he moaned, standing among his barren walls as a group of freshmen gutted the room of copper wiring. The only items left in the two remaining drawers of his desk were a bar of soap and some scattered notes for “20th-Century Franco-Caribbean Literature and the Search for Identity.”

“But I want to do whatever I can to help out,” he said, his genitals concealed only by a tactfully placed WesFest string bag. “These people need my belongings more than I do.”

In an effort to reduce costs and limit carbon emissions, Bon Appetit has decided to team up with student group Wesuckle to bring a titillating new option to the Usdan dispensaries: organic free range human breast milk.

Wesuckle, run by Tracy McTits ‘13, offers breast milk to students who opt in as an environmentally-friendly alternative to cow milk. In a passionate proposal to Bon Apetit executives, McTits expressed concern over the origins of Wesleyan’s dairy products.

“Cows burp. Cows fart,” McTits wrote. “One cow may release up to 500 liters of methane per day, but I don’t release any because I’m a girl and girls don’t fart.”

Even at Wesleyan, McTits’s progressive sustainability movement has garnered little support among students.

Others are especially distressed by the co-op’s attempt to provide its customers with URLs of corresponding WesBreasts submissions. “I like looking at boobs—not drinking from them!” added another student who preferred to remain anonymous.

McTits stands by her logic. Dairy cows require land, corn feed, and large government subsidies. McTits’s only requests include a designated “Pumping Area” armchair in the Daniel Family commons and a discount at New World Laser Tag on Main St.

University Technology Director Waren Karren was born in the back seat of a Greyhound Bus as it crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Her mother was on her way to a Grateful Dead show.

Karren spent her young life following the Dead. Since Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, she has divided her time between two bands: Phish and Password Update Email.

Often described as “heirs to the throne of the Dead,” Phish got together in 1983 at the University of Vermont. They spent the subsequent three decades building a devoted following based on a cultish, free-spirited community ethic, psychedelic culture, and a playful, improvisatory, and multi-sensory concert experience. The band’s fans, called “phisheads,” have been known to follow the band for years rather than lead productive lives. Phish is one of the top-grossing touring acts in the world.

Music critics agree that Password Update Email defies description.

“We’ll do a J-pop cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” said lead singer Moni Jitchell. “But that’s just to get people ready for our grunge cover of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.”

Phish is currently rehearsing for its marathon summer tour. Password Update Email is preparing for a year-long electroclash/post-Linus “outdoor experiment.”

Karren spends most of her time trying to decide which band is better. On February 21, she became so desperate that she sent out a campus-wide email with her dilemma in the subject line: “password update email vs. phish.”